U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) adds Gitea flaw to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog. The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added an Oracle HTTP Server and Oracle Weblogic Server Proxy Plug-in flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-60004 (CVSS score of 9,8), to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog. Gitea is an open-source platform for hosting and managing Git repositories. Think of it as a self-hosted alternative to GitHub or GitLab. CVE-2026-60004 is a critical remote code execution flaw that allows an attacker with write access to a repository to execute arbitrary shell commands as the Gitea service user. The flaw affects Gitea versions from 1.17 and was fixed in 1.27.1. The vulnerable diffpatch API can be abused to plant and execute a malicious Git hook. Because Gitea enables open registration by default, an unauthenticated attacker can create an account, create a repository, and exploit the flaw without existing credentials. A reported attack used the vulnerability to deploy a cryptocurrency-miner-like payload after an exposed Gitea instance allowed open registration and anonymous access to its web interface. According to Binding Operational Directive (BOD) 22-01: Reducing the Significant Risk of Known Exploited Vulnerabilities, FCEB agencies have to address the identified vulnerabilities by the due date to protect their networks against attacks exploiting the flaws in the catalog. Experts also recommend that private organizations review the Catalog and address the vulnerabilities in their infrastructure. CISA orders federal agencies to fix the flaw by August 28, 2026. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, CISA)
88 ID-verification breaches exposed billions of records, highlighting the growing risks of collecting sensitive identity and biometric data. A new report from Mysterium VPN compiles 88 documented incidents since 2011 where data collected specifically to verify someone’s identity or age got breached, exposed, or sold. The confirmed and researcher-verified total sits at 2.15 billion records, with attacker and seller claims piling another 4.54 billion on top of that. The most uncomfortable number in the whole dataset isn’t the total record count, it’s how much of it can’t be fixed after the fact. In 41 of the 88 incidents, what actually leaked included the source documents themselves: ID scans, verification selfies, fingerprints, full biometric templates. A password gets reset in thirty seconds. A face doesn’t. The timing makes the report especially concerning. Of the 88 incidents, 37, or 42%, happened between January 2024 and August 2026, when mandatory identity and age checks were spreading quickly around the world. The message is simple: the systems that collect your ID can be breached just like any other online service. “The pattern of this era is specific: the wall you are forced to hand your ID to is exactly as breachable as everything else on the internet.” reads the report. Some recent cases are particularly worrying. The Tea app, created as a women-only safety platform, exposed verification selfies through an open storage bucket, and the images later appeared on 4chan. Discord users who challenged age-verification decisions also had around 70,000 government IDs exposed through a third-party support provider, even as Discord continued expanding age checks. What makes this particularly damning is who’s actually running the verification layer for the internet’s biggest platforms. AU10TIX, which verifies identity for TikTok, Uber, and X, left admin credentials exposed for over a year. Sumsub disclosed a support-system intrusion that went undetected for 18 months. Persona, which handles age verification for Discord and Roblox, exposed its own frontend configuration. “In 41 of the 88 incidents, what leaked included the actual documents: ID scans, verification selfies, fingerprints, biometric templates. Unlike a password, none of that can be changed.” states the report. “Every major identity-verification vendor from the current era — AU10TIX, IDMerit, Sumsub, Persona, inVOID — has appeared in this timeline. The companies the internet now relies on to hold everyone’s identity documents safely haven’t demonstrated they can do it.” Governments haven’t fared any better with their own centralized registries. Argentina’s national identity system leaked 45 million records including ID scans and selfies. France’s ANTS, the agency that literally issues French identity documents, confirmed 11.7 million people affected in a 2026 breach. India’s Aadhaar system, Thailand’s visitor database, the Philippines’ voter rolls, Brazil’s tax registry, the pattern repeats at country scale roughly as often as it does at startup scale. The report isn’t blaming one company or one mistake. Its main point is that the growing use of ID and age checks is creating more opportunities for sensitive data to be exposed. Every new law that requires ID checks, every platform that adds age verification, and every company that stores identity data creates another valuable target. Putting permanent and highly sensitive information into systems with different levels of security creates a risk that’s hard to ignore. This doesn’t mean ID and age verification have no value. They can serve legitimate purposes. But companies deciding whether to build or outsource these systems should study this history carefully. Relying on a “reputable” third-party provider clearly isn’t enough. “The timeline makes something visible that individual breach reports obscure: this isn’t a series of unrelated failures. It’s one failure mode, repeated across 88 incidents, fifteen years, and every type of organization that has ever decided to collect this category of data.” concludes the report. “What varies is the victim. Sometimes, it’s a startup with inadequate security. Sometimes, it’s a national government that built a country-scale identity registry and watched it walk out the door. Sometimes, it’s a verification vendor that became the single point of failure for a dozen companies that outsourced their compliance obligations to them. “ Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, ID Verification Breaches)
WhatsApp says 1 billion users now use passkeys, while stronger two-step verification and caller context add new layers of account protection. WhatsApp has reached a significant security milestone: more than one billion people now use passkeys to protect access to their accounts. At the same time, Meta is adding stronger two-step verification and more information about calls from people who aren’t in a user’s contacts. Passkeys let users sign back into WhatsApp with a fingerprint, Face ID or their device’s screen-lock code instead of relying on passwords, PINs or one-time codes. WhatsApp now also allows people who use both Android and iOS devices to add more than one passkey to the same account, which removes one of the practical limitations of the earlier implementation. “More than 1 billion people now use a passkey: A passkey lets you log back into WhatsApp with your fingerprint, face ID, or screen lock code. It’s the fastest and most secure way to verify it’s really you, with no codes or PINs.” reads the announcement published by WhatsApp. “More than a billion people have already set one up, and you can now add more than one passkey to your account if you use both Android and iOS devices. To get started, go to Settings > Account > Passkeys.” For people who move between platforms, the ability to register multiple passkeys should make account recovery less dependent on a single device. It is important to highlight that WhatsApp is moving account protection away from secrets that users have to remember or type. Passkeys rely on credentials stored on the device and protected by its existing biometric or screen-lock mechanism, which also makes phishing them much harder than a traditional password or verification code. WhatsApp is also changing its two-step verification system. Until now, the additional protection relied on a six-digit PIN. The company has now upgraded it to a full password that can be longer, use letters and numbers, and include special characters. “Two-step verification is an extra protection layer that helps prevent someone from taking over your account, even if they get hold of your one-time passcode.” continues the announcement. “Until now it was a six-digit PIN, we’ve now upgraded it to a full password: longer, alphanumeric, and even with special ch@racters to make it harder to guess. If you’ve been using “123456,” this is your sign to upgrade.” That’s a small interface change with a meaningful security consequence. A short numeric PIN has a limited number of possible combinations and encourages users to choose predictable values, while a longer password gives account owners a much stronger second factor. WhatsApp makes the point in unusually direct terms, even calling out the classic 123456 choice. If that’s still protecting an account, the app has just provided a fairly unambiguous hint. The change also addresses a specific account-takeover scenario. If an attacker manages to obtain a user’s one-time registration code, the additional password can still prevent the takeover from succeeding. The third change targets a different problem: social engineering. On Android, WhatsApp will now provide additional context when someone outside the user’s contacts calls. The information can include whether the number comes from another country and whether the caller shares any groups with the recipient. That gives users a little more information before they decide whether to answer. “When you get a call from someone not saved in your contacts, a little context can help you decide whether to pick up. On Android, you’ll now see more information about a non-contact caller, like whether the number is from a different country and if you have any groups in common.” concludes the announcement. “Scammers rely on urgency – now you can take a beat with some more info before answering.” It’s a simple addition, but it addresses a common weakness in fraud attempts: pressure. An unexpected call creates a sense of urgency, and attackers often use that moment to persuade someone to disclose information, click a link or continue the conversation on their terms. Giving the recipient more context doesn’t stop a scammer from calling. It gives the user a reason to pause before answering. Taken together, the three changes target different parts of the same account-security problem. Passkeys make authentication harder to steal, stronger two-step verification provides another barrier when a one-time code is compromised, and caller context gives users more information before a potentially suspicious interaction begins. The billion-user passkey figure is also worth watching beyond WhatsApp. It suggests that phishing-resistant authentication is no longer an experimental security feature limited to security-conscious users. At this scale, the challenge shifts from convincing people that passkeys are safer to making sure they understand when and how to use them. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, WhatsApp)
INTERPOL’s Operation Jackal IV made 58 arrests and exposed global networks laundering money from scams, fraud and sextortion. INTERPOL announced that Operation Jackal IV, running from November 2025 to June 2026, led to 58 arrests and identified 263 suspects tied to West African organized crime networks, groups like Black Axe that are responsible for a huge share of the world’s romance scams, crypto fraud, and business email compromise (BEC) schemes. “Operation Jackal IV (November 2025 – June 2026) aimed to disrupt money laundering, identify high-value targets, seize assets, and support arrests and prosecution.” Interpol announced. “The operation, which brought together 22 countries from six continents, is a response to the escalating global threat posed by West African criminal networks – such as the Black Axe and other similar groups. These groups are responsible for a significant share of the world’s cyber-enabled financial fraud, typically through romance scams, cryptocurrency and investment scams or business email compromise fraud, as well as other serious and violent crimes.” The goal wasn’t to chase individual scammers. Investigators followed the money behind the scams: shell companies, mule accounts and criminal services that help move and hide stolen funds. Tomonobu Kaya of INTERPOL’s Financial Crime and Anti-Corruption Centre explained the approach: By following illicit financial flows across borders, we are attacking the very lifeblood of organized crime. Argentina turned up one of the operation’s biggest finds. Investigators identified 196 individuals connected to a crime-as-a-service network suspected of supplying website domains and laundering support specifically for West African criminal groups, resulting in 17 arrests. INTERPOL sent an Operational Support Team to help analyze seized data and map out the wider network of suspects, the kind of cross-border analytical work that individual national police forces usually can’t pull off on their own. South African authorities raided seven locations in Johannesburg linked to a group running romance and investment scams against retirees in English-speaking countries. The syndicate assigned members to specific roles, such as “conversion” and “retention” agents. The operation led to 39 arrests, $2.67 million seized and 257 bank accounts frozen, the largest number of arrests in the operation. Italy’s case shows how much damage a single laundering account can absorb. One individual was tied to a pan-European laundering network moving money through shell companies and remittance services, and investigators traced €845,000 laundered through a single account across 560 separate transactions using 20 different financial instruments. That’s not a careless operator; that’s someone who understood exactly how to fragment a large sum into a pattern designed to look unremarkable at every individual step. Romania’s case was the biggest by dollar value, and arguably the most brutal in its simplicity. A call center ran a fake investment scheme promising big returns on stocks and crypto, funneling victims’ money into wallets the operators controlled, and by the time authorities dismantled it, the estimated theft and laundering total had climbed to around €143 million globally. Eleven arrests and roughly €379,000 in cash and crypto seized, plus six properties and several luxury watches, is a real result, but it’s a fraction of what actually got stolen. “Beyond individual cases, Operation Jackal IV also enabled the analysis of critical and emerging trends, including a rise in West African organized crime groups using sextortion to target minors, with victims as young as 14. Offenders typically contact minors via social media, build trust and coerce them into sharing explicit images or videos.” concludes INTERPOL. “They then threaten to distribute this material to the victim’s contacts unless a ransom is paid.” The report’s darkest finding sits outside any single country’s arrest count. INTERPOL flagged a rising trend of these same criminal networks using sextortion against minors as young as 14, building trust through social media before coercing victims into sharing explicit images and then threatening to distribute that material unless a ransom gets paid. Some of these groups were even observed buying crime-as-a-service support through the dark web specifically to outsource pieces of that operation, treating exploitation infrastructure as just another service line alongside laundering and fraud. That’s the uncomfortable throughline connecting every case here: these aren’t scattered opportunists, they’re networks running organized business models with specialized roles, outsourced services, and financial engineering sophisticated enough to move hundreds of millions across borders. Twenty-two countries coordinating for eight months produced real numbers, real arrests, real frozen accounts. It also produced a fairly clear picture of how much more organized this side of cybercrime has become, and how much further there is to go. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, Operation Jackal)
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has announced that a breach last year exposed customer and employee information. The museum says that on July 11, 2025, it detected suspicious activity on its systems that had started four days earlier. A month later, the investigation confirmed that the network was compromised. At the time, the type of exposed data could not be determined, and the first results of the investigation became available in late February 2026. More than a year after the discovery of the data breach incident, the museum identified that the following information may have been accessed by the attacker: LACMA says it has notified law enforcement authorities about the incident and sent personalized data breach notifications to impacted individuals. Recipients are recommended to monitor their bank accounts for suspicious activity, consider placing a security freeze or fraud alert on their credit file, and report identity theft attempts to their financial institutions and law enforcement.
Norway ’s shared government infrastructure suffered a third DDoS attack, disrupting digital services but showing no signs of data compromise. Norway ‘s shared digital government infrastructure has been hit by another distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that disrupted services used by citizens, businesses and public agencies. The incident began at 03:38 CEST on Monday, August 24, and targeted infrastructure operated by the Norwegian Digitalisation Agency, Digdir, together with its service provider Vivicta. The timing matters because this isn’t an isolated event. Digdir says it’s the third DDoS attack against its services in a short period, following incidents in June and on August 3. “The Norwegian Directorate for Digitalisation (Digdir) has been subjected to a denial of service attack (DDoS attack) that has been ongoing since 03:38 on the night of Monday, August 24.” reads the statement published by Digdir Agency. “This is the third time in a short time that this type of attack has been directed at Digdir’s solutions. Digdir is working closely with our subcontractor Vivicta. NSM and the Norwegian Data Protection Authority have also been notified of the case.” That status update refers to the test environment, but the underlying attack also affected production services. Digdir reported that several shared services became completely unavailable for short periods, while others remained accessible but suffered connection failures, slow responses and longer-than-usual login times. Digdir operates several pieces of Norway’s shared public-sector infrastructure. Among them are ID-porten, MinID, Maskinporten, eFormidling, eInnsyn, the Contact and Reservation Register, Ansattporten and other services used by government agencies and external applications. That makes an attack on Digdir more significant than an ordinary website outage. When a shared authentication service goes down, the disruption can propagate to services that aren’t themselves under attack. That’s exactly what happened. Altinn, Norway’s central platform for communication between citizens, businesses and government, was also affected, while other public services relying on ID-porten experienced login problems. Earlier attacks this summer produced similar effects, including disruption to access to Helsenorge, NAV and Skatteetaten. The technical distinction is important: the attackers didn’t need to break into every downstream service. They could create disruption simply by overwhelming a shared dependency. And that’s often the uncomfortable reality of modern public infrastructure. The weakest point isn’t necessarily the service citizens see on their screens. It can be the common authentication, messaging or data-exchange layer underneath it. Digdir has stressed that the incident is about availability, not evidence of a successful intrusion. The agency also says it has found no indication that personal data was exposed. Digdir has notified Norway’s National Security Authority, NSM, and the Data Protection Authority, Datatilsynet, as part of its response. “There are no indications that the attack has led to a security breach or that personal data has been compromised, says Director Frode Danielsen at Digdir.” continues the statement. That distinction deserves attention because cyberattack doesn’t automatically mean “data theft”. In this case, the confirmed impact is service disruption, while there is currently no evidence that attackers compromised Digdir’s systems or accessed personal information. The operational consequences are still serious. Public-sector users may see failed connections, slow responses or authentication problems even though the underlying applications themselves haven’t been compromised. The June incident already demonstrated how much disruption a DDoS attack against Digdir’s infrastructure can cause. That attack targeted ID-porten through Vivicta’s network infrastructure and temporarily affected services including ID-porten, MinID, Maskinporten, eInnsyn and eFormidling. Another attack followed on August 3. Digdir restored normal operations the following day, but the agency said the incident had again affected several shared services and that it would review the event together with Vivicta and other partners. Now there’s a third incident. That repetition is more interesting from a defensive perspective than the raw duration of any single outage. Digdir and Vivicta are clearly able to mitigate the attacks and restore services. The harder question is whether repeated attacks against the same shared infrastructure can keep generating enough operational friction to become a recurring problem for the wider public sector. This is where DDoS stops being just a bandwidth problem. A sufficiently persistent campaign can force defenders to keep changing traffic controls, filtering rules and protection measures, while legitimate users continue to depend on the same infrastructure. Digdir’s own status updates show that dynamic clearly. On August 24, the agency first reported improvement, then said several solutions were completely down, followed by further stabilization efforts. There is currently no official attribution for the attacks. Norwegian media have raised the possibility of Russian involvement, but that remains speculation rather than an established finding. That distinction matters. A DDoS campaign can be politically motivated, financially motivated, conducted for disruption or simply intended to demonstrate capability. Without technical evidence and an official attribution process, assigning responsibility to a particular state or group would be premature. What is established is the target and the effect. The attacks repeatedly hit infrastructure that sits underneath a large number of Norwegian digital public services. That’s enough to make the incidents strategically relevant without adding an attribution story that the evidence doesn’t yet support. The Norwegian case is also a useful reminder that cybersecurity isn’t limited to confidentiality and integrity. Availability is a security property too, particularly when the affected systems provide national digital services. A compromised database is an obvious security incident. An authentication service that repeatedly becomes unavailable can create a different kind of problem: citizens can’t access services, businesses can’t complete procedures and government agencies may struggle to perform routine operations. Digdir says its services have largely stabilized, although some disruptions remain. As of the latest incident updates, ID-porten still had limitations, eSignering remained unavailable because of those ID-porten restrictions, and some users were still reporting connection problems or increased response times with Maskinporten. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, newsletter)
Uber faces an €825M GDPR fine for automatically suspending drivers without human review, highlighting the risks of AI decisions affecting workers. The Dutch Data Protection Authority handed Uber its largest privacy fine yet, and this one isn’t about data transfers or cookie consent. The regulator imposed an 825 million euro penalty, roughly $964 million, over Uber’s use of fully automated software to suspend driver accounts, sometimes permanently, with no human ever reviewing whether the system got it right. The violation is clear under EU law. The GDPR limits fully automated decisions when they can significantly affect a person’s life. An algorithm that can take away someone’s ability to earn a living, without any human review, falls directly into this category. The regulator also found that Uber failed to properly tell drivers when automated systems made these decisions, which the GDPR requires companies to disclose. “The Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens (AP), the Dutch data protection authority, imposes a fine of 824,990,000 euros on Uber. The reason for this is that the AP has ruled that Uber made fully automated decisions about drivers. In case of suspicions of fraud or customer reviews that were too low, drivers’ accounts were automatically temporarily deactivated or, in case of persistent low customer reviews, permanently deactivated. As a result, their income was lost via Uber during the deactivation.” reads the statement published by the Dutch data protection authority. “According to the AP, Uber has violated the prohibition of fully automated decision-making under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The AP also found that Uber did not sufficiently inform drivers about automatic decision-making. Uber has now stopped the violations.” The fine covers Uber’s practices from 2018 to 2022, so it concerns systems the company has already discontinued. Uber highlighted this point in its response, arguing that the regulator examined old policies rather than practices still in use today. “Uber used software to track drivers’ (driving) behaviour and to track customer reviews. If that software detected a suspicion of fraud or customer reviews were too low, the accounts of the drivers concerned were automatically deactivated.” continues the Dutch authority. “There was no human assessment here. This occurred between 2018 and 2022.” Uber also said it takes decisions that affect drivers’ income seriously. The company pointed to human reviews, safeguards and an appeals process for drivers who believe the system made a mistake. The appeal will have to determine whether these protections existed during the period covered by the fine or came later. And Uber is appealing. The company has stated it disagrees with both the decision and the size of the fine, setting up another round in what’s become a recurring pattern between Uber and Dutch regulators specifically. This is the fourth time the Dutch authority has fined Uber, which on its own says something about the relationship here. The previous record holder was a 290 million euro fine in 2024 over transferring European drivers’ personal data to the US without adequate protections, a case Uber also appealed at the time. Four fines from a single regulator isn’t really a pattern of bad luck anymore; it’s a pattern of a company and a privacy regulator that keep disagreeing about the same basic question, how much human judgment has to sit between an algorithm’s decision and a person’s actual income. The case goes beyond Uber. Many gig-economy platforms in Europe use algorithms to manage workers, routes and account status. This ruling shows the cost of relying on automated decisions without human oversight. For companies that use algorithms to make decisions affecting people’s accounts or income, saying “the algorithm decided” is no longer enough. The €825 million fine makes that lesson very clear. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, newsletter)
Two CVSS 9.8 miniOrange SAML WordPress plugin auth bypasses were exploited while paid editions never appeared in any vulnerability database. Manual patch required. Two critical authentication bypass vulnerabilities in the miniOrange SAML 2.0 Single Sign On WordPress plugin, both rated CVSS 9.8, are under active exploitation. Both CVE-2026-61979 and CVE-2026-15981 allow an unauthenticated attacker to forge a SAML authentication response and arrive in /wp-admin as any existing user, including administrators. The bugs are independent and both have been confirmed exploited in the wild. CVE-2026-61979 is an algorithm confusion flaw. The plugin trusts the incoming SAML response to declare its own signature algorithm. An attacker sets that algorithm to HMAC-SHA1, which causes the plugin to use the identity provider’s RSA public key as the HMAC secret. The RSA public key is, by definition, public. That’s the whole attack: fetch the key from the metadata endpoint, sign your own forged assertion with it, and the plugin verifies it as genuine. CVE-2026-15981 is a PHP bug caused by incorrectly handling different types of values. The openssl_verify() function can return three results: 1 when a signature is valid, 0 when it is invalid, and -1 when OpenSSL encounters an error. The plugin treated the result like a simple true-or-false value. In PHP, -1 counts as true. An attacker can send a specially crafted signature that causes an OpenSSL error, making the function return -1. The plugin then treats it as a valid signature and allows the attacker to log in. It is a basic coding mistake, but particularly serious because the plugin handles authentication for WordPress admin accounts. The technical root cause is interesting. What happened around the bugs afterward is more interesting. The miniOrange SAML plugin ships under one WordPress slug, miniorange-saml-20-single-sign-on, but that one listing actually contains seven completely separate product editions, each with its own independent version numbering. Free runs from 3.x to 5.x. Premium runs 11.x to 13.x. Standard runs 15.x to 17.x. VIP editions start at 32.x and 35.x. No two editions share a version range. When the public advisories were written, they covered only the Free edition, which is the one anyone can download from WordPress.org. The fix for the Free edition landed at 5.4.5. “While that record is correct, when you apply it to the slug, every paid install carries a higher version number than 5.4.5, so every paid install reads as already patched.” reads Patchstack analysis. “Therefore, any WordPress site that was running a vulnerable version like 16.1.9 reported it as patched, along with every other (13.x, 20.x, 26.x, 32.x, and 35.x) vulnerable version.” Every database, scanner, and dashboard in the WordPress security ecosystem was telling paid-edition administrators their sites were safe when the exploitable code was still running on their servers. The update prompt problem makes it worse. Sites running a vulnerable Standard edition 16.x see no available updates in their WordPress admin panel because the fix is on the 17.x line, and WordPress’s built-in update mechanism doesn’t offer cross-line jumps automatically. The path from vulnerable to patched requires a manual plugin upload, which site owners can’t do if they don’t know they’re affected, and every system they rely on was telling them they weren’t. “There was no advisory to read and no vulnerability database entry flagged the paid edition for these vulnerabilities. The plugin reported itself as fully up to date. In other words, every signal that normally warns of a problem suggested that everything was fine.” continues the report. “So, how did DigitalOcean catch the exploit? It had nothing to do with plugins or versions. An anomalous WordPress administrator session attempt appeared from outside their trusted network and was blocked. The attacker had already used the bypass to obtain a WordPress admin session cookie, but was stalled because the admin panel operations themselves sat restricted behind the trusted network. “ DigitalOcean, the team that found all of this, caught the exploit not through any of those systems but through a network anomaly: an authenticated WordPress administrator session arriving from outside their trusted network perimeter. The attacker had already used one of the auth bypasses to generate a valid admin session cookie. The cookie worked. The session was blocked because the admin panel itself was restricted to trusted network ranges. Defense in depth, doing exactly what it exists to do, on a system where every other detection layer had already failed. DigitalOcean then traced both bugs to specific lines of code in the plugin and its bundled XML security library, confirmed the affected version ranges across all seven paid editions (which miniOrange had not published anywhere), wrote two narrowly scoped hotfixes to buy time, and handed the full analysis to Patchstack for publication. Patchstack worked with miniOrange to get the complete edition and version matrix, then updated its database with all seven affected ranges, the first time any public database held that information. Attackers are actively scanning miniOrange SSO endpoints from six IP addresses in Belgium, Nigeria, the U.S. and Germany. The activity appears opportunistic, with attackers checking websites that use the plugin without first identifying the specific version or edition. That makes the silent patch especially concerning. Attackers can probe systems without knowing what version they run, while website owners may not realize whether their plugin has received the fix. “Vulnerability databases are only as good as the version data vendors publish publicly. When a vendor runs seven independently numbered editions under one slug and patches six of them without a public advisory, the entire ecosystem downstream of them goes blind at once: databases, scanners, dashboards, and the site admins relying on all three.” concludes the report. For anyone running this plugin, the full version table per edition is in the Patchstack article. The short version: find your edition, compare your version against the patched column, and expect to do the upgrade as a manual upload rather than through the WordPress dashboard. If you can’t update immediately, two narrowly scoped hotfixes covering both CVEs are published there alongside the IPs to check in your logs for prior exploitation attempts. Check the passkey and admin account list while you’re in there. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, miniOrange SAML WordPress Plugin)
A large distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack has disrupted Norway’s shared government digital infrastructure since Monday, affecting services used by the public sector. The attack started at 03.38 CEST on Monday and has targeted the infrastructure supporting services operated by the Norwegian Digitalization Agency, Digitaliseringsdirektoratet (Digdir), and its operations provider, Vivicta. Digdir operates Norway’s shared digital government infrastructure, including public-service logins, electronic IDs and signatures, secure digital mail, government forms, public-record access, and data exchange between agencies. In an announcement published earlier today, the organization states that several services were completely unavailable for short periods. The agency says many affected systems have now been stabilized, although some services, like ID-porten and eSignering, remain partially inaccessible.
Healthcare and services provider Nutex is investigating a data breach incident where an unauthorized third party exfiltrated information from company servers. The organization has disclosed the cyberattack in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), noting that the stolen data includes details that may be private or confidential. “Based on preliminary findings from the Company’s ongoing investigation, the Company believes that certain information maintained on the Company’s servers was accessed and exfiltrated by an unauthorized third party, including some information that may be private and/or confidential,” Nutex says. Nutex Health is a for-profit healthcare company that operates 28 facilities across 12 states, including the Bayou City ER & Hospital in Texas and Green Bay ER & Hospital in Wisconsin.
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